Making a LoRa Gateway

One of the advantages of the LoRa transceivers, when compared to the traditional RTTY modulation used by most High Altitude Balloons, is that it requires very little processing power at the receiver. So instead of using a PC or a high end tablet or phone to decode the transmissions, all you need is a simple microprocessor with (assuming you want to upload data to the web for mapping) an internet connection.

The latter requirement makes devices such as the Raspberry Pi ideal for the task. A Pi, plus wired or wireless connection, just needs a simple board added with a LoRa transceiver connected to the SPI pins. And that’s exactly what Uputronics has made – and here’s a prototype board that they sent to me:

Normally it comes with a single 434MHz LoRa device but here I’ve added a second (you could add a 434MHz or 868MHz model). The remainder of this post will assume that the board is populated with just one device, in position 1.

Physically install is very simple – just push on to the Pi model A+ or B+, using a standard pin header extender (supplied). Or an pin header with extended pins can be used if you want to stack another board on top.

Next, burn an operating system onto a suitable SD card. For this purpose anything from 4GB should be fine. The following instructions are for Raspbian, and no other operating systems have been tested.

First, run raspi-config:

sudo raspi-config

Then expand the filesystem, as you would normally do, then choose Advanced Options –> SPI and enable SPI.

It’s also worthwhile to change the hostname (Advanced Options –> Hostname). Finally, close the program and choose the reboot option.

Once rebooted, login again. We now have some software to install. First, install wiringPi, which is used for the SPI library and to read the status of the LoRa module via 2 of its INT pins:

This firstly sets your callsign, which if you are a radio amateur would normally be your radio callsign, but it can be something else.

The next part sets the frequency and mode for the first LoRa device (the one in position “1”). Frequency is in MHz and should match the frequency of the tracker that you intend to receive. “Mode” is described below, where the other (optional) settings are also described. The final lines are commented out, to disable the second LoRa module.

27 Responses to Making a LoRa Gateway

I’ve not had a flight far enough away to know, but my guess is that they’re comparable. I’ll have a better idea after more flights. The main question though is how well LoRa works in a chase car, as that’s the most important receiver when trying to retrieve a flight.

Hi Dave, you write: The next part sets the frequency and mode for the first LoRa device (the one in position “1”). I assume that, with markers on my board CE0 and CE1 that the first line sets Frequency_0 for the device in slot CE0 and that Frequency_1 sets it for the device in slot CE1. Am I right ? I have a Pi addon board with one LoRa module in CE1, My RSSI with no signal , with frequency_0 is constant -157 and if I use Frequency_1 it’s -116 and showing changes when I disconnect the antenna. There is no error message callign a frequency on a not installed LoRa module.

By the way, is there a way to have a test transmission myself with only the Pi and the LoRa board ? I would like to see my own signal on the SDR receiver….

I’ve a question regarding LoRa: all examples we’ve found with LoRa are about the use of the LoRa module with an Arduino, a Raspberry and so on.
On the other side, example about using Xbee show that we can use Xbee also with Arduino (or Raspberry) but that it’s also possible to use the Xbee alone.
As we are working on a project on which the receiver must only light a LED, we’re interesting but a stand-alone system (so like “Xbee alone”).
The question is: is it possible with a LoRa module?

It receives data from balloon trackers (e.g. this one http://www.pi-in-the-sky.com/). It does this using a LoRa board such as the one shown in my article. Received packets are uploaded to the balloon tracker and appear on the balloon map (https://tracker.habhub.org). So the entire process is:

good evening, can i know if there is any possible information for me to simulate this LoRa transceiver using Simulink? is there any white papers that could help me design the block diagram using Simulink? sorry but this could help me do my final year project.

I would like to install a LoRa getaway in my supervisor truck, so when passing close enough of a truck equip with a gps data logger, that the data will be received in the supervisor equip with getaway and a laptop and transfer those data to our server. The idea is to avoid using cellular network and fees.